Please ACT, and repost on your blog if you have one!
Imagine your country’s national library – all the history of your nation and culture – as a living archive hand-carved by your ancestors into the stones at sacred sites around the perimeter of your nation, each site holding a precious, unique and irreplaceable piece of your people’s ancestral wisdom.
Imagine generations of your family visiting these sacred sites for family rites of passage, births, deaths, comings of age. Imagine your nation’s spiritual heritage being recorded and celebrated at these sites.
Imagine this happening for centuries – millennia – for your entire nation.
Now imagine a sand-mining company coming in to destroy one key piece of the whole – the piece that gave your women their roots, that connected them to their sacred power as carriers of the nation’s continuity.
Imagine a gash ripped in the organic integrity of your heritage, your past and future as a people.
That is what is about to happen in Australia, THIS MONDAY, 1/20.
The New South Wales government has approved the plans of a New Zealand company ‘Rocla Sandmining’ to build a mine on an Aboriginal Women’s Fertility Rites Songline and Teaching Place. This Songline is part of the Sacred Dreaming Track, and its destruction would destroy with it tens of thousands of years of Aboriginal heritage.
Her Majesty’s NSW Government has approved the company to go ahead with their stage 4 extension, which comprises a massive 30 metre deep hole gouged out of the ground that will destroy these precious, unique Sacred Sites completely.
When visiting the area of the proposed mine, famous French Archeologist Jean Clottes said “This area of the Central Coast has the greatest diversity of Rock Art in the world that I have ever seen”. This diversity is part of what Rocla Sand Mines want to destroy. The Dreaming Track goes right around Australia through every tribal country, and is a common space which all can use to walk, hunt and gather, visit relatives, attend important meetings and participate in special Sacred Ceremonies. It has very great significance in telling Aboriginal History and living cultural and spiritual tradition.
The Dreaming Track must never be broken. Its ancient history cannot be lost.
It is a cultural treasure far more ancient than Great Britain’s Mitchell Library or the U.S. Library of Congress. This is an irreplaceable treasure of the history of the human race -lose it and it is gone forever. And that would be a shameful blight on the history of this land, and this planet.
It is essential that this Sacred dreaming track and its Songline never gets lost or destroyed.
And the Women’s Fertility Rites Songline and Teaching Place is not only a record of the past –it is a living site where children are taught the Song-lines, and ceremonies and rites of passage continue to be held…
….or they did, until Rocla Sand Mining and the NSW Government decided last year that Aboriginal Women could no longer visit their Sacred Place for their ancient rituals.
This is cultural genocide – a repeat of a long British history of cultural genocide. And IF YOU ACT QUICKLY, you can help to stop it.
Remember – mining begins Monday 1/20!!
What can you do?
1. Share this letter far and wide!
2. Sign these two petitions –
- http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/758/710/733/ (the larger of the two)
- http://www.thepetitionsite.com/597/690/556/halt-rocla-sand-mines-proposed-destruction-of-aboriginal-womens-fertility-site-and-cultural-history/
3. Write your own letter to:
Robyn Parker
NSW Minister for the Environment, and Minister for Heritage:
Phone (+612) 9228 5253
Fax (+612) 9228 5763
office@parker.minister.nsw.gov.au
Victor Dominello
NSW Minister for Citizenship and Communities, and Minister for Aboriginal Affairs:
Phone (+612) 9228 4333
Fax (+612) 9228 4392
office@dominello.minister.nsw.gov.au
4. Help start a Twitterstorm – using the hashtag #savethesonglines, Tweet to @RobynParkerMP and @VictorDominello
5. For ongoing information go to https://www.facebook.com/events/224523534398021/
The New South Wales government has been pushing back against protests – they have deleted at least one blogger’s expose – so YOU are a key part of putting out the word.
Please help in any way you can!
With many thanks and blessings,
Suzana Grau
suzana.grau@gmail.com
Phila Hoopes
philahoopes@gmail.com
(for Auntie Beve, spokeswoman for the Darkinoong and the Guringai People.